Ashley Fox - Ninja Orphan
Chapter 34 – Smashing Heads
Sergeant Wulfgar and friends continued to reign chaos across the athletic block, terrorizing the halls between the rec rooms, rest rooms and dorms.
Kaz assembled some friends for an impromptu ambush of their own. The plan was to send some kids ahead to draw the squad out, to distract them. They would be the bait, unlucky rabbits.
Everyone looked at Jones; he was the fastest of the group. He naturally asked why any stupid motherfucker would volunteer to do that.
Kaz handed him one of the assault rifles. "She's yours as long as you want. Go run relays with it, give everyone a shot. It’s just rubber bullets. What’s the worst that can happen?”
"You're crazy," Jones said.
"You got a better idea?" Kaz asked.
Jones shook his head.
"Look, you got the easy part." Kaz meant it.
"Don't leave me hanging.”
"You hit 'em, we'll hit 'em. It's easy. Volleyball, right?”
"Monkey in the middle," Jones said.
"Plus, when it's over, we'll have a bunch of new guns.”
Jones shook his head and set off with a few others to distract Wulfgar and his squad of bastard-smashers. As long as they kept a good distance between themselves and the guards, they had nothing to fear but the sting of a rubber pellet.
Armed with a handgun full of live ammo, another assault rifle, some rocks and a healthy volume of anger, the orphans closed in on the soldiers.
Wulfgar and his five-man team drifted through the athletic gardens.
Corridors opened onto the terraced horticultural center from a dozen different directions. It was difficult to see someone coming, as several balconies ran up both sides of the open structure. Four-foot cement planters, stairwells and crosswalks obstructed the thoroughfare. Only the exact center was open, but even that curved and flowed.
Far ahead, Jones coolly carried the assault rifle into the guards' field of view. Falsely believing it was only loaded with rubber bullets, he didn't even bother firing it. Instead he held it like a guitar and pretended to play, mocking the young soldiers.
Sergeant Wulfgar was the first to raise his weapon and open fire.
Believing them to be plastic, Jones stood perfectly still as Wulfgar's poorly aimed rounds whizzed past his head.
He let three go by, before nonchalantly walking out of sight.
Wulfgar was furious and predictably gave chase, but hesitated when a different orphan stepped into view, pointing another weapon at them.
Unlike Jones, Rebound opened fire, sending three rounds streaking toward the squad, but scoring no hits. Behind the soldiers, he saw Kaz creeping toward them.
Rebound ducked back behind cover as they returned fire.
Kaz walked out into the mall, placed his weapon next to a soldier's head and fired. The bullet caught the citizen under the ear and traveled across his head at an upward angle. It slammed into the far side of the helmet, denting it from the interior.
Kaz was out of sight before the dead man hit the ground.
Their fallen comrade distracted the guards as Tommy took his turn with the assault rifle in the distance.
Tommy got off three shots and scored two hits before a hail of gunfire drove him behind cover.
Miraculously he suffered only minor scrapes and bruises.
Kaz and Hambone, from the flank, opened fire simultaneously.
Kaz drilled Sergeant Wulfgar in the teeth. His brains and helmet exploded into the air. Hambone sent a dozen rounds into the guards. Their bodies were blasted into bloody chunks.
The orphans looked at the rifle, amazed, suddenly understanding it was loaded with live rounds.
From the distance, Jones fired, dropping another soldier.
Hambone cornered and executed the last guard as Jones and the others returned.
They now had eleven weapons, all loaded with live rounds.
The children handled the assault rifles with a new respect.
Kaz counted their blessings in that no one had fired on each other in jest. Even rubber bullets hurt too much to screw around with.
Grey limped to his car, only to discover another government agent waiting for him. It took David a few moments to recognize his brother.
"Father wants to see you," Douglas said.
"Good to see you too," David replied.
Douglas opened the door of a waiting car and helped his brother inside, if only to move things along at a proper pace.
The athletic complex was composed of a series of layers, five levels of practice fields, each partitioned by high-berms, dug outs, bleachers and all sorts of support structures. Peppered with access stairwells to dorms, cafeterias, training halls and medical wards, all Swiss-cheesed with stairwells to the parking garages below.
Under each level's parking garage there was four stories of open sky and then the next level started over again.
The bolt and the athletic complex shared a common design feature, the main elevator banks served a function similar to that of a spine, anchored to the central columns of the individual structures. Additional stairwells could be found at varying points throughout the facility but the elevator banks and their wide conjoining wells were primary security concerns. They were the easiest point of vertical motion between floors.
Lead striker, Kazimov and his newly drafted squad of orphan soldiers had their sights set on a contingent of guards holding the elevator bank on the third level. The zeros stealthily advanced on their unwary targets.
Hundreds of inappropriately armed, bandaged and limping teens, secretly, silently surrounded the six soldiers standing outside the elevators. The teens pretended to be simply milling about. The guards had no idea they were about to be jumped.
The unlocked cafeterias had been raided of every kitchen knife, steak knife and butter knife. In addition to the clumsy cutlery, the mutineers of District Thirteen carried rolling pins, broomsticks, book shelves, broken bottles, slings, rocks and broken bricks tucked into socks. They even swung kitchen appliances, like flails, from their power cords.
The zeros slipped closer, from behind every object and every corner. They had already cut the young soldiers off from any possible hope of escape or reinforcement, other than the elevators themselves. From a floor below, they waited for the signal to rush up the stairs nearby and crush their oppressors.
The guards stood outside the elevators, ignorant of their fate.
A floor below, Hambone signaled for the elevators to be called and boarded. The kids crammed themselves into the cars. They managed to fill five of the six cars before one door slipped closed and the car began its upward journey. The other elevator doors were hurriedly closed and the orphan filled cars began their one-floor trip toward destiny. The orphans inside prayed the doors wouldn't open directly onto machine gun fire.
Outside the elevators, on the open athletic fields of the third level, dozens of kids milled about nearby, waiting for whatever it was that would signal the launch of the impending attack.
The guards had begun to catch on and regarded the children warily. After what had happened to Wulfgar and his bastard-smashers, they knew anything was possible. At the same time, they couldn't indiscriminately fire on anyone walking by. They needed to be provoked. After all, they had live ammunition now.
Still, the orphans threw more aggressive glares and pretty much stopped pacing and milling all together. They simply stood, staring down the half-dozen guards.
One of the smaller citizen-soldiers got nervous and pulled his rifle from his shoulder, where it hung by the sling. He pointed at the ground, but in the general direction of the surrounding zeros. His comrades followed suit, barrels indiscriminately aimed in the orphans' general direction.
With each passing moment the number of kids in the area doubled, until finally, there was no denying it, something was definitely happening.
The soldiers were still and quiet.
The kids remained motionless.
 
; Then the elevator bell went off, signaling an incoming car.
That was all it took. The kids rushed toward the guards, sprinting the dozen yards that separated them.
The guards raised their barrels and opened fire.
The hot bullets ripped through the enraged teens, shredding muscle, splintering bone and destroying organs. Blood, tissue and shrapnel from the first row painted the second, but the charge was on.
As the elevator doors opened, the guards' weapons were ripped from their hands, followed by their limbs from their bodies.
The serial killers' fondest wishes had come true. The children, who had been abused for so long and so deliberately, finally blossomed into exactly what their torturers wanted them to be.
The Zeros gleefully stomped the skulls and torsos of the nineteen and twenty-year-old soldiers into small bits of wet flesh.
The Guard Headquarters for the Athletic Complex was a dozen stories up, just below the second stadium level. They loaded the bodies into the elevator cars and sent them up to the headquarters.
Over the video monitors Major Watrous had watched the massacre. He ordered all guards on freestanding posts and patrols to relocate to their reinforced stations.
The guards abandoned the freeposts in dorms, intersections and elevator banks. They reported to the concrete bunkers, with bulletproof glass, comm.-gear and a security-feed monitor-bank.
The major stared at the screens; they displayed the grisly feed from outside the elevator bank. He watched as the orphans called the empty cars back and filled them with their own dead and dying. The full elevator cars were then sent to the medical ward. He looked at the clock and calculated the hours to their relief on Monday morning.
Over the security monitors, Watrous found it odd that one can’t tell the blood of his enemies from the blood of his friends. The blood of the orphans is the same bright red as the blood of the citizens, whose armor-stripped torsos rode the cars, just moments before.
In his private medical suite, Cedric wheeled some exotic equipment over to Governor Maime's corpse. He inserted a large needle into each side of her neck, and then connected a red wire to one and a blue wire to the other.
Cedric turned back to the machine and powered it up. He picked up a large tank nearby and sprayed bright purple-blue foam over the Governor's body, coating her face and shoulders, where she was burned the worst. In some places she was buried under eighteen inches of it.
Finished, Cedric set the tank down, twisted a couple dials on the calibration machine and wandered off.
Bobby sat in the torture dormitory, on one of the upper bunks.
Throughout the room, kids were chained to their beds. They groaned and moaned, suffering with the pain of severed limbs and the terrible memories of the sadistic thrill had by their torturers.
Bobby sat cross-legged on the bed, his six bullets arrayed before him in two rows of three. The three unfired rounds had told him they were the wavelets, Meyer, Morelet and Sancho. They were the three wise men.
Behind them, in the second row, were the three angry men. They were the bullets who had been fired. Their names were Powyr, Cunning, and Forse and they knew everything. Even though the wise men were wise, the angry men had all the answers.
Bobby had begun to suspect that the angry men talked three times as much as the wise men, maybe ten times as much. And lots of what they said was wrong. But the wise men were almost always right. And if they weren't sure, they said wait.
Bobby waited often and that was fine. He had lots of time to kill. Time never got angry about being killed. If it did, there was nothing it could do about it anyhow.
Bobby smiled, lay back on the bed and slept.